Sound Memories

Our immediate neighbors on both sides have been wonderful since we moved in last year, inviting us to shindigs, letting our dog out when we've been running late, and we routinely hang on to packages for each other that get delivered when someone's not home at the intended address. Our neighbors on the right just had a baby boy two weeks ago, and while I had heard him making those small cries through the walls on occasion since then, I hadn't met him. So it was with more than the usual excitement that I knocked on their door the other evening to pass along a package of theirs that had been delivered to us. As I handed over the box, his dad held him in the crook of one arm, wrapped untidily in a blanket, and I saw the little hands come up as if ready for boxing. His old man face squinched together and the mewling - the bleating - the soft but insistent infant cry that is somehow so recognizable and yet so indescribable - emerged from his crooked mouth and through his turned up nose. He shook his head from side to side. The lamps were lit but it was not quite dusk, that transitional time between day and dark, which has always to me held a sense of sadness and loss, just the briefest of heavy-hearted sighs, before we settle into the night. As the baby grunted for his mother I had an aural flashback to our own first two weeks with Eleanor: the confusion, the steady feedings, no matter the hour, day, night, dusk, dawn, one constant stream of sleeping, nursing, frantically consuming calories through straws, exhaustion, happiness, despair and wonder. We so quickly forget the impossibility of those first weeks - the impossibility of her smallness, of her presence; the impossibility of being able to sustain ourselves on 2 hours blocks of sleep; the impossibility of breastfeeding without pain; the impossibility of her ever growing up, ever changing, because she is so perfect right now.

Of course she is always perfect right now, and at the same time bigger than she used to be, a paradox I am coming to accept. And I am thankful - so thankful - that now, nearly six months in, I am at a place from which I can flash back to those early days. Over last weekend and the first few days this week her sleeping was atrocious, and mine followed accordingly, compounded by insomnia. The fury of lying awake at night. The unrelenting anxiety of 4am, knowing she is about to wake up, the way you cannot stop yourself from listening for any snuffle, cough or cry. The next day spent entirely in anger at the wasted hours. We've dug our way out of that hole, thanks to Josh, and earplugs, and going cold turkey on the pacifiers, and bringing back the white noise (I picture Eleanor's future first visit to the beach - a small child running on the sand, then slowing, then laying herself down and curling up with an overpowering urge to nap). And so it goes - exhaustion, depression, recovery, wonder and happiness, just trying to stay above water, keeping the sleep deficit to a manageable level. It is touch and go. But so much better than those first few weeks.